


Rites of Passage

by missdeviant



Category: The OC
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-02-05
Updated: 2004-02-05
Packaged: 2017-11-11 01:15:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/472841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missdeviant/pseuds/missdeviant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>OCFF for <a href="http://bootylicious26.livejournal.com/profile"><img class="i-ljuser-userhead"/></a><a class="i-ljuser-username" href="http://bootylicious26.livejournal.com/"><b>bootylicious26</b></a>:  <i>Seth/Ryan; Seth is teaching Ryan how to skateboard.  Ryan gets hurt in the process and Seth takes care of him like a good little boy :)</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Rites of Passage

**Author's Note:**

> Love to [](http://torchthisnow.livejournal.com/profile)[**torchthisnow**](http://torchthisnow.livejournal.com/), whose name I mention entirely too often, but all for good reason. She constantly rocks beyond the telling, and puts up with my stuffing her inbox with every bit and drabble that comes by.

Every story, from the grandest epic to the smallest tale, has another side that’s never told. Ryan is keenly aware of this. He also knows the magical formula that makes a person a person is never the same from place to place. Because places have cultures too, and even when they’re as close as Chino and Newport, what equals coming of age in one is as foreign as an African tribal ritual in another.

Trey’s idea of teaching Ryan how to be a man is to get him drunk, plucking their mom’s bottle of generic label bourbon off the end table after she passes out, siphoning the last four fingers down Ryan’s throat before he's processed the situation.

Not more than a few minutes after his “experiment,” Trey takes off with a shout and the slam of a car door. He leaves nine-year-old Ryan alone, spinning, then doubled over the kitchen sink an hour later, wiping his mouth off between heaves with a green-and-white checked dishtowel as their mom takes up the mat on the bathroom floor.

Trey’s idea is to take Ryan to a whore the second his voice cracks and drops; not a real one but to a girl who lives in a green house with a missing shutter in a neighborhood Ryan recognizes but tries to stay away from. Trey and his boys sit outside on the porch and get high while Ryan walks tentatively through the dank living room to a bedroom that’s not much more than a mattress and deceptively fluffy pillows and a painted glass bong filled with dirty water in the corner.

Under Trey’s instruction, Ryan fucks for the first time with the girl, who is maybe seventeen but looks fifty, with bad teeth and bad skin that leaves a sour taste in his mouth. She doesn’t kiss him back, doesn’t even take off her tight black and white striped top as she unsnaps Ryan’s jeans; and she doesn’t make Ryan use a condom even though something in the back of his mind, maybe sixth grade health class, echoes that he should.

When he comes outside ten minutes later, hair hanging over the top of eyes narrowing against the setting sun, Trey slaps an open bottle of beer into Ryan’s palm and offers a toast. Ryan lifts his bottle bemusedly and takes a swig as one of Trey’s friends hitches up his pants with a wink and walks into the house, the hinges of the screen door screeching loudly behind him.

Ryan tries to remember the girl’s name sometimes, but mostly, he blots it out.

Trey’s best idea is to take Ryan out to the alleys of Chino with a crowbar, to an old shitheap of a car. Ryan doesn’t remember protesting, but he likes to think that he did as the crowbar cuts through the air. The glass scatters over the ground like rock candy, tempting in the streetlight, and Ryan wonders if he puts it to his lips it will be sweet. It’s Ryan’s own Kristallnacht, and he’s committing matricide, suicide, killing his mother’s dreams and his for a reason that is as unclear as the dirty glass windows that line the street.

He is scared then, but not in places where it shows to an untrained observer. He is scared in the hinges of his jaw, which ache; in his fists, the skin tight over his knuckles.

Ryan is more scared of Trey than of the cops, he is scared because after getting away with stupid shit for all these years, he is finally going to die.

He doesn’t die, though, but maybe a part of him, the Chino part of him, does. He likes to think that it does. But it doesn’t stay that way. It curls like smoke into Ryan's memories to the music of glass breaking.

It manifests as his brother’s staccato yell that makes all his fibers twitch. The split second decision to jump in instead of run the other way, even though he knows the cops will probably chase the car and not him.

That night, just like many others before, Ryan does what he has to do.

Of course, later on, the night haunts him, but not in the way most people think.

*

Newport is different. In Newport, Seth’s idea of teaching Ryan how to be a man is to take him to an empty church parking lot on a weekday afternoon and drop his skateboard on the smooth asphalt, which is mostly uncracked and doesn’t have crabgrass growing in every crevice like the ones in Chino. The skateboard sits solitary for a moment before Seth gestures to it like Ryan’s supposed to know what to do.

Ryan knows what to do. He always knows what to do.

It’s just that he doesn’t claim he knows how to do it well.

“No Proskater moves.” Seth grins at Ryan. He’s wearing a faded navy blue t-shirt that proclaims “It’s Rad!” in white block lettering, and Ryan wonders why, despite his copious amounts of money, Seth insists on buying the bulk of his wardrobe out of the 80’s bin at Goodwill.

When Ryan hesitates beside the board for a moment, Seth accuses him of being a “Pre-skater” which Ryan thinks must just be another one of Seth’s made up words, but he grins anyway, although only after rolling his eyes first.

Ryan doesn’t know why he does things like this for Seth. He can’t trace his motivations back, but he thinks it began the first day they spent together. When he stayed at the beach house, red cup in hand as he stood awkwardly in a corner, even after Seth had sprung up drunk and yelled to everyone at the party that Ryan was. Well. An outsider.

Sometimes he likes to think it was Marissa that kept him from turning around and running into the night. Marissa’s big eyes and the smile that flitted across her face when she walked down the runway that night. But when he looks into himself more deeply, at why he didn’t even have to think it through before he ran down the steps to defend a dangling Seth, he isn’t sure he likes what he sees.

Like the name of the girl, the first time girl, Ryan has taught himself to push these things into the back of his memory. But, despite all his efforts, he still finds himself going out of his way to do things for Seth. With Seth. The part of him that protests when Seth takes him out to dinner is the same part of him that loves it when Seth pays the bill.

The part of him that thinks he can never skateboard, that he prefers to stick to the bike that made the trip across worlds with him in Sandy’s car, it still wants to show Seth he knows how. That he might not be able to grind or do ollies or any of that other shit that preteen boys are supposed to learn instead of getting wasted and losing their virginities in something that resembles a crack house, but he can make his way in a circle around a flat Methodist church parking lot on a partly cloudy afternoon.

So, honestly, it surprises him when it happens. One second he is on the skateboard, wavering his way around the parking lot, feeling like an idiot, but a proud idiot, smile creeping across his face as Seth stands on like a father, shouting instructions and beaming, and the next second he is on the ground. His legs go out from under him, his palms smack the pavement, his ass follows shortly. His back decides to give out a moment later, dropping his head onto hard asphalt.

It takes a second to reorient himself, and when Ryan opens his eyes Seth is already standing over him, grabbing his elbow with no regard for what might be broken, pulling Ryan to his feet.

Ryan presses his lips together and tastes blood as he wobbles, begins to walk. A moment later he feels it running down his chin. He passes the underside of his tongue over his lower lip, finds the root of the problem. It serves him right that biting his lip while he was trying to concentrate led to *actual* biting of his lip.

All pieces and parts are still attached, even though his mouth does hurt like a motherfucker, and Ryan supposes he should feel lucky about something.

Nothing else hurts, except for his hands, but the light moves in ripples when Seth leads him over to a set of concrete steps attached to the church building. He sits there, on the bottom step, Seth’s hand not leaving his shoulder until he’s firmly seated, the small of his back against the step behind him, his upper arm pressed against a black iron railing.

“You okay?” Ryan hears, and his head moves, up, down, in response. Ryan’s hand comes up to swipe his chin, which is wet again, and comes away with a streak of red on its back.

Seth gets in close, too close, crouching with his foot between Ryan’s legs, squinting in concentration. Seth says something but Ryan isn’t sure what, because he’s focusing on keeping his breath flowing in and out of his lungs, concentrating on staring into the blue sky that sits behind Seth, Seth’s curls obscuring the sun like a cloud.

Seth’s hand is on his then, turning it over, cupping Ryan’s fingers delicately as he rubs away the bits of gravel that have embedded in Ryan’s palms.

Ryan would stop him, Ryan would wince, but it’s like he’s in a trance.

Next to the steps there are shards of glass, a wine glass, maybe, left over from mass, and dropped as someone tried to take it home to wash. More likely a beer bottle, dropped by kids who weren’t old enough yet to have their parties in mom and dad’s beach house. The pieces look like chunks of sugar, cloudy and crystalline.

Ryan’s vision blurs and he sees two images in front of him, the glass in the sunlight in Newport, the glass in the dark in Chino.

A part of him rises up, feral at the taste of blood between his lips. He wonders what Seth would do if he just lifted his hand, put it to Seth’s bowed head, and smashed his cheekbone into the pavement, left him there. He turns his head then, away.

Seth is still there, Ryan can feel Seth’s breath coming close, even with his head turned, his nose almost in his shoulder, he can smell the pizza that they picked up for lunch. He sucks his bleeding lip in when Seth tries to take a look at it.

“You might need stitches,” Ryan hears, and then he hears himself say “no.” Then quieter, “No doctors.”

Speaking surprises him. His voice is far away, nothing more than a whisper in the night. But not night. It’s light. And Seth is here. Not Trey. The wheels are a skateboard, and Ryan has fallen off.

Ryan lifts his head again, anxious to prove it’s Seth, that his mind isn’t playing tricks on him. The quick movement shorts out the world for a moment, fading things to grey so that all Ryan can feel is the gravel in his hands, the gash in his lip, Seth’s breath in close.

“Seth!” he says and it feels like screaming even though he knows it is not.

“Dude, are you sure you’re okay? Because if you start seeing cartoon birds, you know that it’s time to call the doctor.”

Seth’s voice is the same, the usual quick mumbling patter, but it soothes Ryan, and the light comes back. Seth’s eyes are close and unwavering, and Ryan smiles slightly as he dismisses the first thought that comes into his head, concluding even in his disoriented state that Seth is probably inspecting his pupils for a concussion.

Which is probably a good idea. Ryan is starting to feel a bit…concussed.

“Seth.” he says again, and this time there’s something different in his voice, something that he’s tried to tamp down.

“I’m here, okay? But I think, even though you may not be looking forward to it, that it’s time for you and Mr. Peroxide to have a meeting. Then, maybe, if you’re good, I’ll let you and Mr. Bubble hang out in the tub.”

Seth extends a hand and gets to his feet.

“Come on, dude. I’ve seen you beat up about fifty seven times worse than this and you could walk home. You walked *me* home. You’re not going to let a little skateboard vanquish you, are you? You do realize this opens you up to so much mocking.”

Ryan’s eyes lift and he manages a pretty good glare even though his head is really starting to hurt in back.

“Okay, okay, no mocking. Also? No *blaming*. Because really, everyone makes their own decisions, Ryan, it’s called free will, so you can’t take me down with…”

Seth is lit from behind, throwing him in shadow. It’s only when the sun passes finally behind a large cloud Ryan can finally see his face, the way his lips curl as talks.

As Seth talks, Ryan watches Seth’s hands wave in the air like freed birds, and thinks that even though Seth never had anyone teach him how to be a man, he won’t be a bad one, one day.

Ryan’s head is murky, and maybe that’s what makes him stop fighting all the thoughts that have run through his head in the weeks since he arrived in Newport. The thoughts he tried and failed to tamp down with dreams of the slim and mysterious girl next door.

The clouds bouncing around his skull are probably what make Ryan reach up and pull Seth so he’s sitting beside him, silent. They’re definitely what make him take a scraped and bloody hand and move it to Seth’s cheek, slide it back until it catches in Seth’s hair.

His lip hurts, and so does his back, when he rotates and draws Seth to him, but he takes a deep breath, for the lip, for what he’s about to do, and goes on. Seth goes limp against him for a moment before he settles in to the kiss, lets his lips be moved by Ryan’s.

The tongue follows a moment later, Ryan parting Seth’s lips as his head buzzes like a hive. He tastes his blood and Seth’s tongue and pizza and wonders if the blood is grossing Seth out before he wonders if the kiss is.

He wants to breathe Seth in, partly because he’s Seth, and partly because he isn’t Chino, he hasn’t been tainted by the rites of passage that Ryan was forced to go along with.

Ryan pulls back when he realizes through his haze that he might be doing the same thing to Seth.

Seth’s face hangs in front of him, undulating in Ryan’s vision like a jellyfish in a tank. His lips are tinted scarlet, although with flush or blood Ryan isn’t sure. Ryan wants to stop, to ask him the things Trey never did: “Are you sure? Is this what you want to do?” to reassure Seth that it isn’t something he has to do.

But Ryan doesn’t have to speak, because Seth has already shifted into Ryan’s body, taking Ryan’s bruised hands gingerly in his own as his mouth latches on to Ryan’s.

Maybe Seth knows something Ryan’s brother didn’t. There are more ways than one to become a man.

Maybe one of those ways is to give in to the things you denied that you wanted, and to let the ride take you where it may.

Maybe a part of Ryan knew that getting on Seth’s skateboard wasn’t just a way to pass the afternoon, maybe it was a way of moving places, more than around the parking lot of a brick and tile church, more than ending up with a split lip and scraped hands and something that was almost definitely becoming a concussion.

Maybe leaning back in is just Seth’s way of saying he’s ready to grow up.

And maybe, finally, Ryan is too.


End file.
